Carrie Bradshaw is an accidental sex worker. Gilles is her one and only client. He is a walking cliché of the Gallic romantic. His “suave” affectation is so stereotypical they may as well have called him “Pierre Baguette.”
Speaking of crass stereotypes, Bradshaw is introduced to Gilles via the international party girl, (“hooker with a passport”) Amalita Amalfi (Maria Mozzerella, potato-patata). Unlike Gilles, who is an invention of the television adaptation, Amalita appears in Candace Bushnell’s original writing. Book-side, her character treatment has a richer quality than the kitsch role the TV show squeezes her into, prototypical for its throwaway depiction of non-Anglo characters.
In the show, Amalita bumps into Carrie having her card scissored at Dolce and Gabbana and proffers an American Express, courtesy of her lover of the moment (“tiny penis—knows exactly what to do with it”). Later, she invites Carrie to a fashionable bar, Balzac (named after a French novelist who dragged whores over the moral coals), where she introduces Carrie as “the most beautiful, talented, and fascinating woman in New York”. Carrie is thus far green. To her, it’s sweet, OTT flattery. To Amalita, it’s a nod and a wink. Beautiful, talented and fascinating are the italicised script across the body of Carrie’s calling card.
It is only after Gilles leaves Carrie in his expensive hotel room, with $1000 in a white envelope on the bedside table (classico!) does she click. The amorous date she spent with him was of the “paid” variety: this leads to a pithy discourse between her two best friends, Samantha and Miranda, on the politics of sex work, over really good salmon. Later, upon a new introduction to an even more glamorous (but handsy) Venetian, Carrie prevaricates on the legitimacy of moving forward into “the life”—globetrotting with multiple lovers in return for expensive gifts and fashionable hotels. She decides, “No, just because Venice is sinking, it doesn’t mean my morals have to go down with it.”
Carrie prevaricates on the legitimacy of moving forward into “the life”—globetrotting with multiple lovers in return for expensive gifts and fashionable hotels.
But what makes Carrie truly so different from Amalita? She forms love affairs with rich men that depend on her erotic appeal. In doing so, she is able to go from cash-poor writer to wealthy woman. Her self-leveraging shares more in common with expensive sex workers than her ode to “morality” assumes. The argument is not that she is a sex worker in any explicit sense, but that she is a particularly apt example of the transactional interpersonal culture into which the Sex and the City characters are more broadly embedded, and for which sex work is an implicit feature.
Let’s fact-check her fiction. Carrie lives in Manhattan and writes a “girl about town” column, gathering its content by hobnobbing with modish bohemians, ambitious career women and speculation capitalists. In doing so, she forms multiple affairs with rich men, churning the precarity of her position within these entanglements into fodder for pulp. Indeed her columns, not unlike the poetry of Veronica Franco or the memoirs of Harriett Wilson (Renaissance and Regency sex workers), serve as much as an extended arm of her public relations campaign as any dispatch from her world. Carrie exercises her sexuality and social performance skills to construct herself as an erotic icon, thus obtaining access to wealth adjacency. In doing so, she accumulates capital both from her connections to wealthy men, and from her ability to sell these affairs as paper content.
For Amalita? In the original writing we meet her after having left a dysfunctional affair with an English aristocrat, back in Manhattan on the look-out for a new patron. She laments the vulnerability of the position of the financially supported mistress; unlike by-the-hour call girls, she can harvest trinkets but not always accumulate cash. The modern day “rich girlfriend” might have a degree of partial “respectability”, but what she gains in social legitimacy she loses out in the opacity of the ill-defined deal.
Carrie exercises her sexuality and social performance skills to construct herself as an erotic icon, thus obtaining access to wealth adjacency.
The watery membrane that Amalita shares with callgirls is also shared, at another remove, by Carrie. What separates Amalita from more explicit sex workers is her mode of working. What separates Carrie from Amalita is narrative. She isn’t amassing wealth. She is “finding love”. But her long-term lovers are, in most cases, considerably richer than her and she is socially mobile through them. Even her most “down to earth” lover Aidan is able to purchase two adjacent Manhattan apartments, become a silent investor in a bar and owns an—albeit humble—cabin home in the countryside. And he pales in comparison to the exorbitant wealth of financier Mr. Big, and famous artist Petrovsky, lovers that she commits herself to more enthusiastically.
In Bushnell’s writing, transactionality is presented as characteristic of hyper-capitalist Manhattan and this reliably extends into the interpersonal realm. Bushnell’s thoughtful treatment of the presence of expensive prostitution within this context implies a cross-over with the more explicit culture of chasing wealth and status: befriending the “right people”, presenting the “right image”, and marrying up. In the show, the writers skirt close to this insight and jump frightfully back. In several scenes (subsequent to the Gilles episode), Carrie is “horrifyingly” mistaken for a sex worker: by Carrie Fisher after she catches her in flagrante with wealth-faker, Vince Vaughn. More on the nose still, by a businessman whilst she is waiting for Mr. Big in his building lobby. Until she secures her fortune (partially through improvements to her writing career, but also through her advantageous marriage) she is on the vulnerable outskirts of these luxury buildings and lifestyles. She is navigating revocable access to the content required to make her column seductive to readers.
Lots has been written about the consumerism of the show, either as an abstract social issue (in postfeminist media theory) or as finger-wagging judgement of Carrie’s profligacy (on social media). But Carrie is engaged in class-drag. Her consumerism, though excessive, is necessitated by her position: the columnist who has to gain ongoing access to wealth cultures for which she is, initially, only peripheral. Her spending is a hamster-wheel of self-construction without which she’d never sustain entry into the world her career depends on. Characters like Charlotte and Natasha have accumulated social capital (looks, style, self-assurance) out of the deep pockets of class-privilege. They are pedestalled by modern audiences tipsy on a zeitgeist of neo-conservativism—old money good! rigid beauty standards good! bourgeois morality good! Carrie, on the other hand, is sniffed at for pulling second-hand dresses out of thrift stores and pairing them with designer shoes bought on credit—sculpting herself into noticeability “on the run”.
What separates Amalita from more explicit sex workers is her mode of working. What separates Carrie from Amalita is narrative.
And it’s not just about the finances, it’s about the “social role” that Carrie fulfils for the men in her life, marshalling a frothy, playful appeal. Rather than classically elegant, she is sexy and whimsically outré. A trendsetter rather than a tradition follower. Sex workers come in every variety of human package, but the mythos of the whore—the intangible versus conventional appeal (there’s just something about them)—corresponds with the construction of Carrie’s brand of desirability. And just as Carrie’s dubious finances are sniffed at, so too are her looks; social and erotic ambiguity are often considered laughably intolerable to those reactionaries who favour “clean” hierarchies.
One might wish to disagree with the thesis; Carrie has feelings for her rich lovers. These are “real relationships”. She isn’t making an explicit deal. But these factors—“feelings” and “explicit deals”—are not definitionally necessary to sex work in the broadest sense, which is using one’s sexuality for financial gain. It can be by the hour, by the evening, by the week, and for a set fee. It can be by the month or by the year, and for more indeterminate gain. The emotions contained in the dynamic can be hostile, tolerating, neutral, friendly or passionate. Recall that Amalita doesn’t call her client “her client”. She calls him her boyfriend. Carrie quips in her voiceover in the episode in which Amalita appears, “What’s the difference between professional girlfriend and just plain professional?”, but this is near enough a tautology: it means the same thing both ways around, which phrase goes first as much a question of optics as anything else.
Carrie isn’t a sex worker, but the role she fulfils for her rich lovers is so thin in its difference to Amalita’s that the show’s persistent “joking” about her being mistaken for one is amusingly telling. It discloses the show’s unarticulated ambivalence about the sexual freedom it purports to support, as well as its need to keep its more populist viewers on side, in a way that a more faithful adaption of the original work would never have achieved. Furthermore, we have insight into the complexities of Carrie’s inner life; her affairs are presumed more profound because we are privy to their emotional impact. Amalita is a passing curiosity. Her life can more easily solidify down to rare economics. In the book, the gap between them is much narrower, the complexities of Amalita’s life explored and commodification of Carrie’s life faced with more honesty than the adaptation was brave enough to emulate.
For more discussion of depictions sex work on television, check out Whoreview: The Penguin, Sex Workers in Severance, Succession, and More, and Whoreview: Bada Bing! The Sopranos.
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